


Gnaw Your Bones Dry

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [41]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Firestorm (Comics)
Genre: Actual Superheroing, Anger Management, Cops, F/M, Fire, Gun Safety, Harley Is Team Mom, Harvey is only mostly okay, Humor, Hyenas, Janus the Bicameral Man, POV Multiple, POV Outsider, Police Misconduct, Were-Creatures, a flagrant disrespect for the law, all the action is at the front, fair warning, just a bit, mental health, one day i will use mothman as something other than a background character, that's my secret cap, the plot structure of this fic is so whack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-31
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2019-03-11 19:05:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13530660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: "Guys!" came Enigma's voice, bouncing up the narrow stairwell. "News just in! Werehyenas on Beacon Street!"Jokester fell unceremoniously out of bed."Were-what?" Harvey demanded, folding his paper back on itself so he could see over it."I'm there!" Jason shouted, springing to his feet to grab his jacket, his sword, and the biggest gun he had access to.He snagged his helmet and was out the door before J had located his boots, and Harvey threw on his own mask and charged after him, still tugging it straight.Teenagers.





	1. Neither the Jackal

**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of genuinely good reasons to dislike the spotted hyena. They stink, they're intensely social without being particularly good at altruism, and their cubs are alarmingly fratricidal.
> 
> I maintain a contrary fondness nonetheless.

It was a lazy, grey sort of afternoon in the current Circus headquarters, with the air heavy with the promise of evening rain and the vigilantes not currently out for such purposes as surveillance, lab work, or grocery distribution taking the slack time to rest up.

Jokester was actually in bed, the foldout couch he and Harley had been sharing in their current transitional quarters never having been folded up that morning, most of his costume besides the pants cast aside to let him sprawl in T-shirt and socks while he scribbled in a notebook; Harvey, on the other side of the room, had his feet propped up on a footstool that was more duct tape than fabric because of all the places it had found to leak sawdust from, but which was still the exact right height to lean back and enjoy the newspaper.

Jason was in the one clear corner, contriving to do pushups in a leisurely, relaxed sort of way.

"Guys!" came Enigma's voice, bouncing up the narrow stairwell. "News just in! Werehyenas on Beacon Street!"

Jokester fell unceremoniously out of bed.

"Were- _what?_ " Harvey demanded, folding his paper back on itself so he could see over it, even though there was still nothing to see but the shabby room and its other two inhabitants.

"I'm there!" Jason shouted, springing to his feet to grab his jacket, his sword, and the biggest gun he had access to.

He'd gotten Harlequin to teach him to use one, and they'd had their most serious authority struggle yet about whether he was allowed to carry, and if he did what caliber situation was considered serious enough to actually shoot. (He'd shouted at Harley for the first time ever and then _cringed_ , a full-body cower half guilt and half conditioned fear, and then tried to pretend nothing had happened even though everyone had seen. She'd let him have a gun, after that, and he'd promised to shoot it only if he was _sure_ nobody he wouldn't be okay seeing dead was in the line of fire.)

He snagged his helmet and was out the door before J had located his boots, and Harvey threw on his own mask and charged after him, still tugging it straight. _Teenagers._

This teenager, unfortunately, had been trained by a pitiless taskmaster who expected him to be the most mobile thing in any urban environment, up to and including motorcycles, small hovercraft, and pigeons, and was out of sight before Harvey had gone two of the ten blocks to Beacon Street. Hopefully the _werehyenas_ (why) were making themselves obvious enough that he'd be able to figure out which way to turn when he hit Beacon.

The hyenas themselves weren't helpfully barking out laughter, but the alarmed shouts and the sight of a row of tense policemen six blocks west was enough of a hint. He turned left.

Janus (the Bicameral Man!) caught up to his compatriot just in time to see the Red Hood flung half a block by an enraged backhanded blow delivered by a presumable werehyena.

Jason hit the street twenty yards further up, nearly on top of a second tall, shaggy creature, and rolled to a stop, limbs splayed; Harvey had an irrational bad moment before the boy twitched and jumped to his feet again. And promptly flung himself into combat with the nearest monster, the one that hadn't thrown him.

Harvey shook his head. No one knew what it took to fully incapacitate a Talon, but Jason's blithe assumption that that meant nothing _could_ was giving Jokester and Harlequin five separate kinds of fits. Leave it to them to adopt the problem kid to end all problem kids, was all Harvey could say.

He focused on the immediate problem.

The threat appeared to be restricted to a single pair of shaggy, dark-speckled brown figures, each about eight feet tall, if they hadn't been hunching. Effectively, it was closer to seven. They had stubby muzzles, pointed ears on the tops of their heads, massive shoulders, and long claws. The nearer one seemed to be slightly smaller than the other, and it snapped warningly at a police officer it seemed to feel was too close. The man went grey and scuttled back. Further away, the other hyena thing snarled and slashed at Red Hood's chest. He dodged.

Harvey could see why they were being called werehyenas. The hyena features were mainly in the pelt and shape of the head, while the upright posture and elongated thorax encouraged the assumption that they were somehow human, never mind the humanlike shoulder joints and the individual clawed fingers on each forelimb.

But most tellingly, the smaller one was _wearing boots_. It didn't seem particularly comfortable in them, and kept stumbling as the empty toes dragged on the ground unexpectedly and threw off its stride, but it would seem that giant werehyena feet were similar enough in size to a human heel for the boots to have stayed on. Harvey thought they probably pinched, though.

There were smears of blood on the street where injuries had presumably occurred—no sign of the injured; they must have been carried away for medical treatment. No sign of any blood on the hyenas' jaws, which was especially important if they actually were were-things, since it lowered the chances of their having passed on a contagion, but he _could_ make out some marks on the nearer creature's claws.

Janus took a moment to wonder how this was his life, and then stepped forward, into a gap between police officers, joining their line.

These would mostly be the better class of Gotham cop, simply because they were the ones willing to go up against snarling superpowered monstrosities on the basis that it was their job, and who hadn't run yet.

Of course, some of the same officers who were so brave and fierce facing down monsters were the ones who thought of ordinary police work in the same terms—as a deadly war against the hydra called Crime, whose heads were every suspicious-looking individual, and everyone who failed to respect their authority.

It wasn't an incomprehensible way of thinking. Harvey had thought that way himself, once. But no matter how understandable it was, people who thought that way in positions of paramilitary power became the iron-gloved fist of tyranny, and (as J would have said) it wasn't okay. Even if half of them _hadn't_ belonged to Owlman.

But that didn't mean you could just let them get hurt, either. _Especially_ when they were bravely doing their duty.

( _Yes it did_. No, it really didn't.)

They'd gotten here fast, too, to beat him and the Hood both; they must be mostly from the Beacon Street Precinct. Harvey definitely recognized one tall, lean black officer with his hair in braids so short they stood up straight, and no doubt Jokester could have identified more of them, called them by name, and used his knowledge of their personal strengths to make a game plan. Most beat cops would listen to J in an emergency, these days, wanted lunatic or not; his success record spoke for itself. Hopefully he'd catch up soon. Harvey's people skills had never completely recovered after his apocalyptic expulsion from city politics.

(Abrupt switches in perspective to thinking of individuals as irrelevant, or to wanting to punch anyone who annoyed him in the face, made his old smoothness hard to reach.)

The force had a rough semicircle drawn up on each end of the stretch of street that contained the hyenas, though the ones at the far end of the block were starting to fall back, in the effort to avoid being hit with the amazing bouncing masked swordsman, whom the hyena kept batting away, and who kept coming back for more.

What exactly did Jason see as the goal of his attack? Harvey'd seen him when he wanted to kill; this wasn't that. (And good thing it wasn't. This didn't have to turn any more violent than it already was. _Didn't,_ shut up, no.) But whatever Red Hood was up to at his end, Harvey had his own monster to worry about. He moved forward again, through the police line, into the oblong space they'd encircled. A few of them looked annoyed with him, a few looked relieved, nobody tried to make him go.

The larger hyena looked sharply toward him, nostrils flaring, as he became the closest living thing.

"Okay, listen," Janus said, continuing slowly forward with his hands spread, using a calm, firm voice he mostly used on frightened dogs, though sometimes he'd used it on particularly skittish witnesses. "Do you understand me? No one needs to get hurt. Just calm down."

He didn't know exactly what had happened before they got here, but it _could_ have been a misunderstanding. The Circus understood about people overreacting to frightening appearances.

The hyena crouched, eyes fixed on him. Its growl seemed somewhat less aggressive, or maybe that was just his imagination. "Yes, see, we're all fine. Everything's fine."

Down the street, the other hyena snarled as it slammed Red Hood into the pavement, and he stood up again even before the sound of his bones breaking had faded from the air. (That kid made Harvey's hair stand on end for more than one reason.) Janus' hyena-creature tensed. ( _It would be really satisfying to put his head through a wall for **both** reasons._ Shut up. Not unless he breaks his word.)

"Alright," he allowed, "I admit, _they_ aren't getting along so well, but kids will be kids, right?"

It looked at him. Ground out a low snarl, and took a step forward. Janus thought it seemed curious. He thought it might understand him.

"Two is a good number," he told it. "You and your friend, it's good you have each other for company."

For all he knew, there were a lot of whatever-they-were somewhere, but so long as they weren't driven to attack in one another's defense, having company could only take the edge off the irrationality of desperation. So that was definitely good.

"The way I see it, there are basically just two options, now." J would say not, that there was _always_ another option if you looked, infinity of options, but he didn't understand how comforting and steadying a narrowing-down of the world into two clear possibilities could _be._ "Either you calm down, stop acting threatening, and we call off hostilities and try to work this out, or the threats keep coming until this turns into a fight. Nobody wants that. You're outnumbered, so you don't want that."

It growled, but not with particularly strong hostility. Suspicion, possibly, and definitely distrust. Its eyes didn't look human, but they were at least as expressive as a dog's, and dogs were very sensitive to behavioral cues. Hyenas were pack animals.

"What do you think," he asked, not letting his voice turn up at the end of the question in a way that might seem like weakness or provoke anxiety.

The werehyena lurched another step toward him, and Janus clamped down hard on the overactive _fight_ side of his adrenaline-response instincts, and kept his hands open and visible. The hyena was in fight mode, too, right now. If they couldn't get it to stand down, they were going to have to kill it. It was amazing Animal Control wasn't here already with rifles. They'd arrive soon, no doubt.

Basic animal-behavior zoology showed that when a predator experienced itself as being attacked or harried, hunting was shuttled well down its priority queue unless it was literally starving, and the hyena's ribs weren't showing _nearly_ that much, so if it attacked him, it was going to be because it felt threatened, not as predator to prey. Even if there was a more complex, human mind under there somewhere, as the _wer_ in were-hyena suggested, it wasn't in any state to override instinct with any of the spectacularly dumb or symbolic acts that humans under pressure were sometimes prone to. This should work. Could work. Might work.

Flip a coin. Take a risk. If the gamble paid off, they could end this without further bloodshed. If not—Harvey was the one who got the immediate fallout. Because it was _his_ risk.

The hyena let out a low, questioning sort of growl-whine sound and took another long-limbed step, hunching its mighty shoulders a little more as it went, but not like a quadruped gathering for a leap—more like a very tall person trying to get a closer look at something low down. Its attention was fixed entirely on the smooth two-toned surface of Janus' mask, as though it thought the stiff black and white fabric was hiding an expression somewhere. How good was hyena vision? _Curiously enough_ , that wasn't a subject into which Harvey had done any prior research. He was vaguely aware that they were one of those species with a bite strength developed to let them get at bone marrow. "It's going to be okay," said Janus.

Further up the street, the other hyena roared with frustration as Red Hood clotheslined its legs out from under it, just as someone out of Janus' line of sight fired a grappling net over it to pin it down, and Harvey's subject tensed, eyes twitching, nostrils flaring, its head jerking up and around, a low growl reverberating sharply.

And that was all it took for a cop at the far end of the line to open fire. " _No, you idiot!"_ Harvey shouted, too late.

One bullet went through the front window of the building behind the hyena. Four lodged in the brick. The hyena flinched and snarled at the impact of several that actually slammed into its chest, and then lunged, without any sign of serious injury, toward the freckled, milk-pale officer that had done the shooting. He stood petrified, empty gun still upraised in both hands. (Idiot, **idiot** boy, no sense of consequences, deserved to be eaten. _Shut up._ ) The policewoman next to him tackled him around the neck to pull him back out of the way, as those around them scattered, a few more firing off shots apparently in hopes of splintering its focus.

And then a wall of fire bloomed across the street, cutting off both the hyena's progress and Harvey's line of sight to the idiot with the gun. The creature reared back in alarm just in time to avoid searing its muzzle.

" _Cool_ it now, bud," said Firefly, dropping out of the air to alight in the midst of his own fading fireburst, his polished visor brilliantly reflecting shattering flame and slavering hyena jaws. "Getting shot at kinda _burns_ , sure, but biting people's heads off never helps anything." He ignited his flaming sword and stuck a defensive stance as the flames flickered out around his feet. "Are you going to back down? Or do we have to do this the hard way?"

Mothman, who must have been the one to fire the net that had now entangled the other hyena, swooped in down the street to support Red Hood, and Harvey decided he could afford to listen to his impulses and devote a second to make sure nobody was dying behind the window that had gotten shot out. Rather than go knock on the front door, which the inhabitants might be too wary or too injured to open, he did what J would have done and stretched up to grasp the windowsill, braced his toes against the slight protrusion of the foundation, and pulled himself high enough to switch to pushing, until his weight was balanced on his palms, and then finally grabbed one of the anti-theft window bars and drew himself up to kneel on the narrow brickwork sill.

 _This_ was why, if you were going to be a vigilante, you had a demanding daily exercise routine. Climbing the outsides of buildings and running halfway across the city at the drop of a ridiculous event. Forget how hard you could _punch_ , this was when fitness really counted.

Well, the unexpected falls were the real clincher, but this was an example. "Hello in there?" Janus called through the broken window, pitching his voice so it would hopefully travel through any interior walls the bullet had penetrated. "Is anybody shot? Do I need to call an ambulance? Or just a doctor?"

"Mother _fucker,"_ was the grumbled response. More teenage boys. Wonderful.

"It's just a graze," said another voice, a woman, probably the boy's mother, trying much harder for calm. "I'll be fine. You make sure you don't get hurt out there, son."

"You're sure, ma'am?" Janus asked.

"You're bleeding! And he wrecked the table, Ma! And there's holes through—"

"Don't be dumb," the woman with the bullet graze reproved. "You think he's the only person out there? Embarrass the life out me, boy. Go on!" she called to Harvey. "You just make sure it don't happen again!"

"Yes ma'am."

Without leaving the vantage point of his windowsill, Janus turned back to face the street, where the thin blue line of police had reformed and seemed willing to await the results of Garfield's duel, which so far had been only a lot of snarling and the smell of scorched hair.

Firefly had taken flight again, while Harvey's attention had been elsewhere, and was hovering and zipping about around the creature's head-height, which seemed to disorient it, and definitely made him harder to catch. The were-hyena seemed to mind burns considerably more than bullets, but it was clearly only going to be a matter of time before it landed a blow, and Firefly's suit offered minimal protection against anything besides heat and small-caliber gunfire. Those claws when they hit were going to tear deep.

Further down Beacon Street, Mothman and Red Hood had the larger hyena tangled in multiple nets, pinning it in place and limiting its attacks, but were struggling to get it sufficiently incapacitated to take into any kind of custody. They weren't in trouble, but neither of them was going to be available to support Firefly any time soon.

Janus' ally needed a distraction. Well, then.

Harvey fumbled in his jacket pocket and found the appropriate supplies. _Flick._

The paired smoke bombs burst on either side of the fight, billowing up opaque white on one side and solid black on the other. The hyena gave an almost-human wail of alarm at the loss of vision and the choking scent in its nose, but Firefly had high-efficiency filters in his mask, and was used to working blind. A sizzle and a howl of pain arose from inside the cloud.

Janus and the police waited with baited breath. At least no one was stupid enough to fire into the obscured area.

 _Ready?_ Harvey asked himself, as the smoke began to go gray and thin, and the outlines of the combatants inside began to show through. _Time to do something crazy._

**_Finally._ **

Janus stood up on his perch, waited until he was sure he had gauged the distance correctly, and flung himself through the smoky air at the monster's back. Struck, clung briefly to coarse fur, got an arm around its neck, and clenched tight.

It might be a giant supernatural creature, but he was pretty sure it still needed to breathe.

Hyena claws scored Harvey's wrist and he bared his teeth and held on harder. Distracted by smoke and Harvey's grip, the creature was much more vulnerable to Firefly's attacks. Constantly harassed by Firefly, it couldn't focus properly on dislodging the millstone around its neck.

The flying hero did his best to help Janus—blew the lingering smoke into its face (which meant in Harvey's face); goaded it into vigorous movement, using up more oxygen and meaning it needed breath all the more urgently. Fire licked around them both. The creature's snarls grew more ragged and more desperate.

Harvey held on.

Finally, it fell. Forward into a crumpled heap. Harvey let go in time to keep his arms from being trapped under its bulk, and staggered back, coughing from his own smoke bomb, bleeding from one arm, and smouldering slightly from a near-miss on Firefly's part. Swung immediately around to locate the freckled officer whose bullets had set off this whole chain of events. The young man's color had improved, and he still had his gun out, still clutching it like it could be expected to protect him.

"Damn it, son!" Janus burst out. "Violence is not the answer!"

The gaggle of cops that had just watched him do his level best to strangle a hyena monster gave him a collection of looks ranging from blank to sardonic, and he let out a long, irritated breath. All of them, missing the point. Everyone always missed the _point._

"You have to admit," Firefly laughed at him before he could launch a tirade, landing on the opposite side of the fallen furry form, "it's sometimes _an_ answer. Not bad, Double-Header. You were on _fire_ there."

Only part of one sleeve, Harvey thought, but decided that would be ungracious to point out, since all things considered he couldn't object to Firefly's involvement. "No," he turned around to say drily, feeling the pull of the claw wound in his forearm and hoping it didn't mean he was in danger of turning into a werehyena himself, "that's _your_ job."

Firefly snapped his fingers at the point scored, and Harvey began to feel that this had gone rather well, all things considered.

Except then _the hyena got up._

It shouldn't have been as surprising as it was—they hadn't hurt it _that_ badly—but it was. Mostly because it lurched from prone to upright almost without transition. Firefly took a step backward with a cry half of alarm, half warning, relighting his sword with a _fwoom!_

Janus whirled, tensed into a crouch, prepared to dodge; he was not well suited to engage something like this directly at close quarters, and there would be no talking it down now.

But the hyena, it transpired, had been cowed by its temporary defeat, and had no wish to confront that burning sword any further. With a burst of desperate strength, the creature sank onto its haunches, drove both forelimbs into Firefly's chest, and _shoved_ in the same moment that it launched itself into the air so powerfully that Firefly was knocked flat, the shoulder of his protective suit sliced open, as it sailed up onto the roof of a neighboring building.

By the time the jet-powered hero could get aloft again, the second werehyena had vanished from the rooftops, and from sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep swiping Firestorm's villains; I should do actual evil Firestorm. Except DC noticed he has the best villains and used them in other titles first, that's why they're here. And evil Firestorm is hard because he's two people and they have enough trouble working together when it makes _sense_ for them to have some similar goals.
> 
> Harley is treated as the team firearms specialist because she's actually the one who uses them most in canon, I mean this woman can handle a bazooka? (J uses guns but he tends to think of them as props more than weapons, and he's only a so-so shot, although he gets lucky a lot.)


	2. Nor the Wolf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may recall this was supposed to have two chapters. Whoops.

The smaller hyena stumbled repeatedly as it fled up the alleyways. Its breath came unevenly and it lurched as it turned another corner, into a low lane so old it was still cobbled, which ran alongside a church that was not quite as old, a structure built of the dark brick that had been so common in Atlantic port cities in the nineteenth century, and cased in a sheath of more expensive quarried granite.

The creature seemed to like this place of stone, because it was here it stumbled to a halt. Braced its unstable boots against the edges of two cobblestones, pressed its face against the cool grey of the church façade, and began to emit a low, thrumming murmur.

Slowly, the great shaggy form began to dwindle, and the thrum resolved itself into a low, steady chant: _“_ I am Summer Day. It is May sixth. I am human. Everything is going to be okay. I am Summer Day. I am human. It is May sixth. It’s _okay_.”

Until finally there was only a slim young brunette, naked except for a battered pair of boots, her face pressed into the side of a building. The calming mantra trailed off, and she stood for a few more long seconds, letting the granite leech heat from her forehead.

A small, polite throat-clearing from behind her made her jump, and whirl, her arms wrapped defensively around the front of her torso to protect a remnant of her modesty. She stared.

The sound had come from something that seemed like it must be a hallucination: a tall grinning _clown_ , with a purple ponytail and gold epaulets. Standing in the alleyway with both hands extended, a lime green bedsheet hanging from them like a screen, and studiously looking off to one side.

“Ms. Day,” the apparition said. “I thought you might need this.”

“You…how…I didn’t hear you!”

The clown grinned at a point somewhere over her head. He seemed to have an impossible number of teeth. “I’m sneaky.”

“I hear _everything_ when I’m—like that.”

“You were focusing pretty hard. Look, my arms are getting tired, are you a nudist, or…?”

Summer Day pressed her lips together, crept forward a few steps, snatched the sheet, and retreated. “How did you know?” she asked, as she looped the fabric around her body, bringing corners up around her waist and shoulder to tie over her chest in a way that betrayed her long and growing experience with makeshift garmenting.

“You were chanting your name pretty audibly—”

“Not that. This,” She tugged at her bedsheet dress.

“Well, I heard there were weresomethings running around, and I figured if you changed back you might need emergency clothing. I was right,” the strange figure added, very pleased with himself.

Summer Day bit her lower lip, watching him like she couldn’t decide if he was predator or prey. A lot of her really couldn’t. “You’re the Jokester, aren’t you?”

He looked pleased. “You’ve heard of me.”

“Mm,” she admitted. Not being from Gotham, she hadn’t thought all that much about it, but she’d heard. She’d even heard about the purple hair, although she would have expected it to be much more vivid. And curly. Clown wigs were always curly. But what was with his _face?_ Was there makeup that could do that. His mouth seemed too wide to be human. “You seem much more…real, in person.”

“Doesn’t everyone? Oh. Oh, I see. The face. Well, yeah. This is the genuine article. No cosmetic supplements required. And _you_ seem to be a real actual werehyena in person! Can we talk about that?”

Summer Day huffed, almost scoffed, and folded her arms across her chest. “If we must.”

“Ooh, well, _must_ is such a harsh word. But! I’m guessing this happens often?”

“More often than I’d like.”

“And it has nothing to do with the moon.”

Summer didn’t ask how he knew that. “No. I get set off when I…let myself get excited. Well. Upset, mostly. Angry. Especially.”

“You got angry today?” the Jokester’s voice seemed free of judgment, and Summer nodded, a little stiffly. “Mind if I ask why?”

She looked away. “A couple of policemen took exception to my friend and I. Well. Mostly him. They asked if he was bothering me. I said no, I guess kind of forcefully, and they asked if I was a prostitute.”

Her face began to twist into a scowl, before she caught herself and turned half-away from her interlocutor to lay one palm on the cool stone again and repeat her breathing exercises.

When she turned back, her expression was like stone. “It wasn’t the _insult_ , you have to understand. They tried to take us into custody while they ‘investigated’ whether I was or not. And of course charges would never stick, but they wouldn’t have to, to completely ruin our day, and that would be the point. Punishing us for not being deferential enough. We weren’t afraid of them, and they could tell, and it made them want to hurt us. That kind of abuse of power, just….”

She shook her head. “Anyway. I lost control around then. I mauled one, and when his partner shot at me my friend attacked him. We must have been near a station because backup arrived in…” She paused, trying to calculate the timeframe from the shadowy memories from inside the change. “Less than two minutes.”

“Those guys,” Jokester asked carefully, “did they die?”

“...not before they got to an ambulance.”

“In that case I absolutely do not blame you at all. Are they going to turn into hyena people too?”

Summer’s face twisted in uncertainty. “Probably not. I don’t think they _repress_ their anger much, so even if the infection does set in, it will probably burn out.”

“Hmm,” the clown said thoughtfully. “Come on. We should meet up with my people before someone besides me catches up to you.”

The swaddling layers of Summer’s lime-green toga were presentable enough, though likely to come apart if she moved carelessly, and paired with the brown leather boots that had survived her transformation could pass for actual clothing on cursory inspection, but the color was also glaringly noticeable. Moving away from the last place the escaped werehyena had been seemed like an excellent idea that she should already have put into action.

She hesitated anyway. “What are you going to do with me?”

“ _Do_ _with_ you? That sounds so cold.”

Summer tossed her hair; it was just long enough to lash like mane. “Are you going to have me locked up? And if you aren’t, what do you plan to do about my friend?”

“Well, that depends. See, we don’t exactly have the facilities to restrain people who’re dangerous to the public, so mostly, we let the police handle that. I guess they probably have him in custody by now?”

“Oh no,” Summer said. The words came out sort of flat and dead—like she was going through the motions of being alarmed. Actually she was upset, could feel herself in the distance being distraught. But she couldn’t let the feeling get close, so she didn’t. “If anyone should be arrested, it’s me; I know better than to lose my temper but I got so _angry_ anyway. He was just protecting me.”

The Jokester let out a little laugh-sigh sound. “Want to go tell everybody that?”

Summer pressed her lips together. “I can’t. Even if anyone would listen. If—they have him…tied up, or…as soon as anyone gets hostile, it’ll set me off again. Especially—hyenas are matriarchal. When we change, that makes me _responsible_ for him.”

The clown nodded thoughtfully. “Does that mean he’ll listen to you?”

Summer blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re his pack leader, right? If we can get you to him without you flying off the furry end of the handle, can you calm him down?”

“I…” She frowned. “Probably. It hasn’t come up before, really. He usually reins it in sooner than I do.”

Jokester nodded again. “Worth a shot. I figure you’ve already tried mood stabilizers?”

“Mm-hmm. They just mean it’s harder to come down again when I do lose control.”

“Drat.” He started walking and Summer followed him, trying to decide if walking with such an eye-catching person was more likely to get her noticed, or to draw attention _away_ from the fact that her dress was made of bedsheet. Hopefully all anyone would notice about her was the 'dress' being an even brighter green than his suit.

“Here,” he said after a little while, and offered her a chocolate bar. It was a convenience store brand, very close to the cheapest option possible that was still made of actual chocolate, but Summer was _ravenous_ , and the immense quantity of sugar and thick tongue-coating flavor of all the extra cheap fat actually tasted pretty great. It occurred to her only as she was licking her fingers that she’d just taken candy from a very strange stranger without even considering whether it might be laced with anything.

Well. She was already following him somewhere without asking questions.

It turned out the place he was leading her was a strange leaf-festooned and ivy-swathed gazebo that seemed to be made of intricately twisted living wood, tucked into a corner of some kind of city park. He’d radioed ahead about it, using a series of mysterious code-words. Summer wasn’t sure whether the level of organization that implied was ominous or reassuring.

Waiting inside for them were a tiny blonde woman and a short red-haired man. The latter was wearing emerald green, a bowler hat, a domino mask, and some sort of sparkly glove, and carrying a cane shaped like a question mark. (Just in case she doubted that she’d fallen in with superheroes.) The woman was wearing cut-off jeans and a Gotham City YMCA T-shirt.

“So this is our werehyena,” observed the masked man, barely looking up from the back of his right hand long enough to run a sharp evaluating gaze over her, as she ducked in under the fall of ivy that screened much of the entrance.

The inside of the gazebo was lined with benches covered in smooth live bark, which nobody was using, and rather dim—on a sunny day it would probably have been perfect, but the current overcast lent an oppressive air.

“This is Summer Day,” announced the Jokester, coming in behind her. “Miss Day, these are Harlequin and Enigma.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Harlequin. She almost sounded like she meant it.

“Likewise,” Summer replied automatically.

“What’s your story?” Enigma demanded. He kept fiddling with his glove, which was covered in tiny lights that seemed brighter in the gloom.

Keep it simple. “When I was twenty-one, I started having blackouts. It mostly happens when I’m angry.”

“What happens?”

The ivy swathing at the far entrance of the gazebo lifted itself aside without any visible mechanism or human agency to let the speaker in. Another woman, taller and curvier, with her flaming-red hair caught up in the sort of doubled-over ponytail that served as a lazy substitute for a bun. She was brushing dirt off her hands, and her attention had zeroed in on the clown.

“This had better be important, J, I left my poor assistants trying to tell people how to take care of their new tomato plants.”

“You can go back if you want,” Jokester said. His words weren’t apologetic, but his tone kept them from being a dismissal. “Just didn’t want you to get mad about not being consulted. Miss Day, this is Ivy, the Wild Rose of Robinson Park. Ivy, this is Summer Day, she turns into a hyena monster when she gets mad. She got into an altercation with the cops earlier, and they’ve got a friend of hers in custody. She’s gonna tell us why we should help her spring him.”

He could have _warned_ her she was going to have to make her case to a group. Then again, maybe it had been very intentional that he hadn’t. This was a test. Summer cleared her throat. She wished everyone would sit down. “They’ll never let him go,” she said. “We’re monsters. They won’t—care whether we’re at fault, even more than usual. And the more stress he’s under, the more often he’ll change, and the less control he’ll have. And eventually, somebody will get hurt.”

Well. Somebody besides whoever they’d already hurt today.

The row of evaluating gazes seemed to be considering what she’d said, which was better than outright rejection.

“If I can get him out,” she tried, “we’ll get away from here, and nobody needs to suffer any worse.”

Jokester’s eyebrows, when she glanced left at him, were firmly planted halfway up his forehead. “So,” he drawled, sprawling his weight backward against one of the tree-columns that framed the entryway, “you want us to rescue the ravening beast so you guys can split town. What happens _next_ time you get ticked off? Why are you even vacationing in our town?”

“We have it under control! Mostly.” Summer sighed. “Look, I get it. We have a cabin out in the middle of nowhere. We’ve been meditating and everything…we’re getting a handle on it, I swear.

“Just, sometimes it’s nice to pretend to still be real people for a while. And even though isolation is safer, we can’t afford to get to the point where strangers make us tense, or we’ll be getting more dangerous instead of less. So we take day trips. It was my idea, though, and _I’m_ the one who lost it.

"If you want to swap me and him, that’s fine, just get him out. He doesn’t deserve this. Everything is my fault.”

She’d wrapped her arms around herself as she talked, maybe because wearing a tied-on dress made of other people’s bedsheets felt so exposed, and was about to stop before she realized it probably helped sell her plea, then decided to stop anyway because if she kept doing it just to look pitiful, it would probably show. She’d never been a very subtle person. Even before her emotions had started bursting out of her in the form of a furry rage monster.

The owners of the living gazebo were trading looks around her. Summer breathed, and tried not to get angry. They had the right not to help. They hadn’t actually promised her anything. She’d been the monster attacking their town half an hour ago. They’d be within their rights to hand her over and wash their hands of the whole hyena mess.

Then Enigma wordlessly held out his glittering machine-covered hand, and some sort of holographic image blinked into being, hovering above his wrist—a newspaper article. ‘Kidnapped Boy Rescued By Sasquatch’ was the headline, the kind of thing that would be worth a laugh on the cover of the _National Enquirer._

It was a page-two story from a real newspaper, though, a local. Summer had read it before. There wasn’t a photo, just the kid’s description and a rescue worker’s admission of having glimpsed something big and bipedal, with fur. 'Probably a bear.'

How did he _know?_

“I’m guessing your retreat is in New Hampshire,” was all Enigma said. (That was where the story was from.) “You didn’t kill anyone then, and nobody’s dead now,” he observed.

“That’s true,” Summer said, numb. “We just,” she said. “We just want to help. We don’t want to hurt anyone. When it’s on purpose, we usually don’t. We’re excellent scent-trackers,” she added inanely.

The inevitable flare-up of self-disgust in her chest flickered and...died, when no one seemed outraged by the admission that they took that risk, turned themselves into monsters on purpose when the situation seemed to call for a monster. Like it was perfectly natural.

Enigma nodded, and seemed about to say more, when the fall of ivy was again brushed aside, this time by hand, to let somebody tall duck their way inside the gazebo’s shadows. Summer glanced over, and then tried very, very hard not to double-take. She probably failed.

The newcomer was a tall man in a heavy grey suit, wearing a longsuffering expression. One half of his face was twisted by hideous scars. Summer couldn’t begin to imagine what could have done so much damage, and left the other half of his face clean. In places the flesh seemed to _drip,_ and in others it looked scoured away.

Both eyes still seemed to work, and the half of his mouth that had a withered upper lip and swollen lower one bent up into what she thought was a wry smile at the same time as the ordinary half.

(She realized belatedly that the undamaged features were almost absurdly good-looking, a strange half-step between the pair of beautiful women and the Jokester’s stark deformity. Was Enigma the only normal-looking person they had?)

“Summer, this is our friend Janus,” said Harlequin.

Jokester’s smile had gone crooked. “You may remember him.”

She might…?

The _mask_ , divided like his face though so much more cleanly. Black from white. It was distant, blurred, the way these memories usually were even now, but it flashed across her mind and she recognized it. The person who had stepped out in front of the police and tried to talk her down, and then—jumped on her back, yes, she was almost sure now, someone definitely had done that, and choked her. She remembered the feeling of her warped knees hitting the ground, the animal panic as darkness closed in.

Summer froze when she spotted the neatly wrapped gauze bandage peeking out of the end of Janus’ sleeve. Her claws. She remembered catching him with them. “You need to get away from me,” she said flatly.

A ring of space opened immediately, leaving only her and Jokester, who must have seen her seeing the dressing and be pretty sure she meant just the newest arrival. _He_ stepped to one side, between them, to screen her line of sight.

“Why?” his voice was light and easy and perfectly level, his expression not quite relaxed as his eyes picked her over, his hands held carefully in view. A lot like Janus had been, earlier, before the shooting started and the fire monster turned up. “Is he going to set you off again?”

She shook her head. “No. No, I’m fine.” This might have been a slight exaggeration. “But he might not be. It’s…

“Do you ever have problems with your temper?” she asked Janus, as though she could still see him and there wasn’t a clown in the way. (The clown moved away again after a moment to allow this, not at all sheepish.)

“And _how_ ,” Enigma scoffed, taking a seat on one of the living wooden benches now that he'd backed up against it anyway. Janus gave him a sour look but didn’t dispute the claim.

Summer nodded. “You’re in trouble, then. I…only a few people have developed this condition. We’re still not sure what the original source was.”

She’d almost definitely picked it up as part of the Peace Corps in Africa, but she couldn’t even be sure what _country_ , and neither of them had the funds to fly to Africa and roam at random until they stumbled over the answer.

Well, she supposed they could roam as hyenas for free, but that would be neither responsible toward the African public nor conducive to the habit of control. Even if they could have afforded it, it was a needle in a haystack search; they’d be better off flying to India for spiritual guidance.

“But,” she continued to the more important part, “the odds of contraction seem to be increased by continued proximity to the infection vector.” She pulled a face. “Which is not my wording, by the way. Anyway, my friend and I are the only ones still alive. Not because the condition is fatal! Just. It damages impulse control. And makes you look…frightening.”

As though this man didn’t already. And his divided face was frighteningly blank, suddenly. She couldn’t blame him.

Harlequin reached over and touched his arm. “Janus. Hey.”

“You’re the hyena?” he asked. His voice was low, and flat, and oh, yes, definitely angry, in a deep, tightly controlled way that made it so much more dangerous. To him. But eventually also to everything around him.

Summer closed her eyes. “Yes. So one of us _needs to leave._ ” She opened them again. “I’m sorry,” she told him. Because she was, because he’d been being a hero and she’d been too sunk into instinct not to hurt him, and it was very much entirely her own fault. “I don’t want you to end up like me.”

“Take the purple line north,” Jokester suggested, and tossed his scarred friend another bar of chocolate. Same brand, but dark chocolate this time with raspberry filling. “You got this, Harv,” he said. “Just breathe. You want one of us with you?”

A little of the sourness melted away as Janus thought about it; then he smiled. “No. I’ll make for the bird sanctuary; meet me later. I’ll be fine,” he declared, and seemed to mean it, where he wouldn’t have a minute ago.

The clown grinned. “Lemme just walk you to the station,” he said, and strode up the middle of the gazebo, and the two men left together.

“So I’m guessing you had a good reason this time, too,” Enigma said to Summer, once they were gone. “Or J wouldn’t be on your side.”

She winced. “Not a really good one. It was stupid. Police harassment. I shouldn’t have blown my top.” People died for less. She was just lucky enough to be occasionally bulletproof. (And white, when she wasn’t.)

“That isn’t a _terrible_ reason, though,” Ivy allowed. She was the hardest of all of them to read, but Summer thought there might be a hint of respect in her expression that hadn’t been there before. She’d heard they were anarchists. Technically they were criminals. Apparently fighting the police was a valid course of action around here so long as the police started it.

“And none of them are in critical condition, by the way,” Enigma put in, squinting at another holographic display.

Summer let out a breath. That was good. It was. She wished she could expect they’d have learned a lesson, but more likely they’d just be _more_ aggressive with the idea that suspicious persons could secretly be giant fangy monsters.

"I just…I hate seeing police be unjust.” She shrugged. “I always _wanted_ to be a cop. Ever since I was a kid. My father was one.”

And he’d wanted a son to take after him so very much. A son she’d stopped being able to stand in for, as soon as puberty struck. No matter how many teams she was on or how often she was top scorer or MVP, it was never enough, because it was only ever _girls’_ varsity. Doris was the perfect daughter, and Summer was the embarrassing failure trying to be something she wasn’t.

She shook her head. She’d been getting better at letting that go, damn it. “I worked toward it, but—there was a sexual harassment scandal, while I was at the Academy, and I testified. Didn’t make me a lot of friends. I’m not proud of it, but I let myself get driven out.”

Dad hadn’t even said a word, which had been worse than if he’d been disappointed in her.

Harlequin frowned. “Hey, don’t you take responsibility for that. You did the right thing.”

Summer shrugged. “But I couldn’t follow through.”

“No, not following through would’ve been recanting your testimony. What you did was remove yourself from a hostile environment. That’s basic self-preservation. The people who chose to make the institution hostile to you for _doing the right thing_ are the ones at fault.”

Summer smiled awkwardly at the tiny woman. It was weird to have someone so  _fiercely_ defending her from...herself. “Okay, okay. Thanks. So…are we really infiltrating jail?”

“Don’t worry,” said Enigma airily. “We do this all the time.”

“Do you want me on this?” the Wild Rose asked, apparently of the gazebo in general.

“I think we’re trying for plausible deniability,” Harlequin replied, which was apparently a no. “You should head back to Regreening. Get Strawman to meet us at the depot, or send somebody else to drive if he can't leave the clinic yet? Sorry about dragging you away for just this.”

“Oh, it’s fine, it’s good for the volunteers to practice working without me, and I like being in the loop. Consider me on-call if you get into trouble.” With an absentminded wave, Ivy departed through the drift of her namesake.

“Do we need to retrieve any identifying documents or anything you might have dropped?” Enigma asked Summer. His fingers were dancing over his high-tech wrist in little flashes of light. He lived up to his name, she decided, despite having no air of mystique whatsoever.

She shook her head. “We weren’t carrying anything. Learned precaution.” Which was another sign of selfishness, taking steps to minimize the risk to themselves if the gamble they were taking with everyone’s lives failed to pan out. But on the other hand, there’d been times when a determined attack hyena had been just what was desperately needed in the moment, and hesitating because you had your wallet in your pocket could mean disaster.

They’d brought some cash, but they’d spent half of it on dinner and the hospitalized cops had taken the rest—a civil forfeiture on the basis of the prostitution charges, supposedly, and even if they hadn’t turned into hyena monsters they weren’t going to spend months in court to get back their twenty bucks. Police forces made a lot of profit off of that fact.

Enigma nodded absently. “Okay, so, just the one to extract…better make it fast, before they transfer him somewhere more secure…”

“First things first,” said Harlequin brightly, to Summer, without interrupting Enigma’s muttering in the least, and looked her up and down, squinting thoughtfully. “You’re a little smaller than Ivy,” concluded the petite blonde. “Don’t you think?” she asked, eyes flicking up from Summer’s hips to her face. Summer shrugged. Sure, she guessed. She hadn’t really contemplated the other woman’s measurements during their brief acquaintance, but they’d been about the same height.

Harlequin grinned, this confirmation apparently enough. “Not that that shade of green doesn’t look good on you, but I want my bedsheet back. Let me get you some pants.”

* * *

The Circus troupe that wound up on the jailbreak operation consisted of the Jokester, a Red Hood, Harlequin, and Enigma, with one Strawman running logistics and exfil, i.e. driving the getaway vehicle.

(Strawman’s limbs were thinner than most people’s bones. Enigma continued to be the only normal-looking person. Well, the Red Hood might look normal, but he hadn’t taken his mask off in front of her yet, so as far as Summer was concerned he didn’t have a face. His voice sounded young.)

The targeted police station was not really especially secure, and with the young person in the red helmet sneaking in ahead of the rest of them to sedate everyone with potential line-of-sight to the holding-cell block with targeted bursts of soporific gas, Enigma handling computers and cameras, and Jokester taking locks, Harlequin was serving primarily as security detail for Summer, whom it had been generally agreed they didn’t want cornered into transforming in the middle of the station.

Summer was slightly unnerved by the _efficiency_ with which the operation proceeded, under a layer of easygoing humor and constant teasing. Enigma hadn’t, it seemed, been exaggerating much when he said they broke the law this way _all the time_.

She wanted to ask if Harlequin had some kind of bodyguard training, but couldn’t think of a way that didn’t sound presumptuous; more like she was questioning the woman’s ability to protect her than simply not wanting to discount any possibility. There probably wasn't any bodyguarding training that specialized in 'giant mallet,' anyway.

When they found the cell, it was still fully occupied by an eight-foot-high beast, fully conscious, shackled at one ankle with heavy chains to the bars and by the other to the base of the prison cot. He was standing, hunched, his ears brushing the ceiling. The torn remains of a wire net still tangled around his shoulders.

Summer’s anger flared, and then blunted. She squeezed her own thumb until the knuckle quietly popped, and breathed deep. They were here to get him out. No dwelling on how unfair this was. No fuel for the fire.

Summer and the Jokester moved forward, while Harlequin guarded the entry point to the cellblock and Red Hood skulked improbably in the place where the wall met the ceiling, the edge of one foot braced against the top of a bulletin board his only perch.

It had been agreed he should stay out of the target’s line of sight in the interests of calm, since he’d evidently been instrumental in his capture. (Summer had a vague recollection of something red and brown that had probably been him.) It was sort of surprising he hadn't protested against undoing the work, just grumbled quietly and said something vague and ominous about the 'fate of interesting prisoners' in Gotham.

“Go on,” Jokester prompted. “Do your thing, Pack Leader.”

“Clan,” Summer said; tucked her hair behind her ears, took a breath. “Hyenas live in clans. Hey,” she said, walking up to the bars. “It’s okay.”

Her friend had to lurch awkwardly to face her, banging an elbow in the process, but he hunched toward her with his full attention. He didn’t growl.

“Shrink down, would you?” She put out her fingers and brushed his forearm through the bars. “It’s okay. These people are helping me get you out.” He stared at her. An ear twitched. “I know you don’t feel safe but _please_ relax.”

“Summer,” Harlequin said softly, without turning from her sentry post. “Maybe it would help if _you_ weren’t agitated?”

“Crap. Yes. Of course.” She breathed. She had lots of experience at this point, breathing. She didn’t need to be angry. Or scared. Neither did he. They were _dealing_ with this. Finally, she touched his arm again, her fingers curving over the bones of the wrist under wiry fur, and held his eyes. They were still his eyes, even large and blank and yellow. Something in them she recognized.

“You listen to me,” she said firmly. “Everything is going to be all right. If you just calm down.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hyenas' origin has been retconned a few times, but the only thing I changed about Summer Day's backstory was the reason she didn't become a cop; the canon one failed the psych. Which is _really hard to do._


	3. Nor the Spotted Pard

Harlequin thought, glancing irresponsibly over her shoulder to glimpse the brunet turn her face up soothing at the hyena-creature, of King Kong, but of course that was an illusion. They were exactly as dangerous as one another.

Judging by what Summer Day had and had not said, she was probably Patient 0 for the hyena syndrome, or at least he had gotten it from her.

Peeking again, she caught the moment when the monster in the cage lowered its shaggy head toward the hand on its forelimb and huffed out a sigh, then dwindled abruptly down into a nervy-looking man with sharp, dark features, black hair with a suggestion of curl, and no clothes whatsoever, who swayed and fell to one knee. The suddenly loosened chains slipped over his heels; Mothman's tattered net slid from his shoulders. Harley looked away again, as Summer caught his hand between the bars, tight and reassuring.

“Still clear,” Harlequin murmured, back at her post. The only two people in view were slumped over their desks. The sergeant was snoring. Strawman’s work continued to be a marvel. “You’re up, pumpkin.”

J jimmied the lock in a few seconds flat and ducked into the cell bearing sweatpants. “Hey there, get dressed real quick, I’m Jokester,” he announced, hauling the man to his feet and shaking his hand in the same gesture, pushing the pants into his opposite hand as he let him go.

“Jivan,” was the dazed reply. Slight accent. The shapeshifter shook himself and started clambering into the pants. J also had a T-shirt, which the prisoner accepted a moment later. His head popped through the collar and the Gotham Knights logo settled over his chest. “Doctor Jivan Shi.”

“I hope you didn’t tell the cops that.”

“I couldn’t _talk._ ” Shi tensed suddenly, and looked toward the security cameras.

“It’s okay, they’re down,” said Summer. It was nice she trusted Ed's work so implicitly already. “Come on!”

They slunk out a fire door with its alarm temporarily disabled and into the back of an electrician’s van, curiously empty of electrician’s gear, waiting with the engine running. “Go!” Harley called, slamming the rear door, and Jon merged them smoothly into traffic. A minute later Enigma looked up from his cyberglove and announced, “We’re clear.”

There was a round of cheering, and then Jivan Shi cleared his throat and said, “Er, regarding my condition…”

“We got the story from Summer,” Harlequin told him.

“No, actually, how do you come in?” Jason disagreed, tense behind his mask. As Doctor Shi had reportedly given him no less than nineteen bone fractures earlier today, several of them in the same bones more than once, he could perhaps be forgiven the rudeness.

Doctor Shi certainly seemed to think so, because he answered without sign of offense. “I was in charge of Summer’s care at a certain clinic. As it turns out, the curse can be passed through sufficient emotional intimacy, if there's some physical contact. After six months of treatment, I…” The man made an embarrassed gesture, and Harley saw Jon wince in sympathy in the driver’s seat.

Their new guest was obviously someone who believed very deeply in self-control and propriety; turning into a slavering monstrosity of untempered impulse would have been deeply embarrassing even if it _hadn’t_ been a result of an emotional transgression.

Jokester, on the other hand, was chasing down a completely different track. “Hang on. You were her _doctor?_ ” he asked, a broad smile bending across his face.

Summer Day looked immediately defensive, leaning her weight toward her partner, but Shi just twitched his shoulders self-consciously. “I know, it was completely unprofessional…”

“Not that!” Harley cut in. “I mean, yeah, obviously, and medical ethics and stuff, but no. I was _his_ doctor! Psychiatrist.” She pointed at J, couldn't help a laugh. “That’s how we met! And then I broke him out of Arkham, because there turned out to be an evil conspiracy, and…anyway. Crazy coincidence, huh?”

“…just a little,” Summer allowed. For the first time since they’d found him in his cell, Jivan smiled. It was a bashful little thing.

They took the van back to an abandoned bus depot on the neglected inland edge of the warehouse district, the one that had had a new commuter-friendly station constructed twenty years ago, shortly before the shuttering of the old suitcase factory, following which the construction of the new throughway had rendered this whole section of the bus system formally obsolete.

The old station was now too far out of the way of everything to be a popular squat and was currently deserted by everything but dust and Ivy, who was waiting for them in the middle of the wide open tiled floor with a picnic blanket and a large basket of sandwiches.

When they arrived, Pam had her face buried in a thick bound volume comprising all four issues of a genetic engineering journal from last year, an empty plastic sandwich bag beside her; she set it aside long enough to distribute sandwiches and then went back to ignoring everybody. Summer looked like she thought Pam might be mad--possibly about Harley giving away her sweatpants--but Harley recognized the symptoms of an exhausting day of public interaction, and wasn't worried. It was a family rule that you didn't have to go off by yourself to be left alone.

For herself she took the peanut butter sandwich with a sticky purplish-red heart drawn on it in jam, because she knew it for a signal Ella had helped put the sandwiches together, and would be delighted to be told the one she’d filled with extra love had been chosen by Mommy and been delicious. She swapped a quarter of it for a quarter of J's pastrami.

Jivan and Summer both began to drowse halfway through their own meals (tomato-and-watercress and tuna-fish-with-dill-pickle, respectively), and the Wild Rose, without glancing up from the book in her lap, cleared her throat loudly. “I know you two probably want to crash, but not here, please. Contagion concerns. You need to swing by your hotel for your bags, right?”

You could always count on Pam to play bad cop. She'd gotten softer about it over the years though--or maybe she just liked these hyenas. One of her soft spots had always been for her fellow metahumans. The well-intentioned ones, at least.

Glances were exchanged. “We could make do without,” said Summer, “but I’d like to. We should check out, too.”

“Hmm. Less suspicious that way,” J admitted, rubbing his chin, “but getting you downtown again’ll add another hour at least to getting you out of the city, even if traffic cooperates. And rush hour’s kinda starting, so.”

“It’s okay, we signed in under false names and paid cash,” Summer shrugged. “It’s actually—not a hotel—the hostel on King?”

“Oh, okay, I can get somebody to grab your stuff, then. Hang on, I’ll go make some calls. Which beds?” They told him and he dashed off again.

“He does that a lot, doesn’t he?” Jivan asked.

“ _Yes,_ ” said Ed and Harley in the same breath. They both snickered; their eyes met and they snickered again, harder.

“…I don’t actually know any adults,” Jason spoke up from the corner, very dry. Ooh, harsh, ha.

“Excuse me,” protested Pam, still without looking up from her book.

“Alright, I _guess_ there’s you. Janus. Possibly Strawman.”

“Excuse _you_ ,” said Strawman.

The Red Hood let out the sort of laugh that he made when normally he'd have grinned at you, but had remembered you couldn't see his face. Leaned over to snag a leftover roast beef sandwich from the basket, and stood up. “This seems pretty handled, so I’m gonna split for now. Catch you later.” He directed this to Summer and Jivan specifically, rather than any of the family, and ambled out.

Good, he was going to eat. Harley's least favorite thing about that helmet was how he couldn't eat or drink with it on. He neglected himself enough without.

“That meant he’s decided you’re not a threat,” Jon informed the hyenas.

“Unless it means he’s gone off to lurk ready to deliver a single-stroke assassination from the shadows as soon as one of you moves wrong,” corrected Ivy absently.

Raised her eyes from her book as she felt the pressure of everyone’s attention in the ensuing silence. Harley buried her face in one hand. Pam wasn't exactly  _wrong,_ but Jason didn't actually do that sort of thing anymore either, and there was no need to worry their guests like that. Ivy was just making trouble. She was _almost_ convincingly ignorant when she asked, “What?”

“If he _is_ watching,” declared Ed, “I’m pretty sure he just revoked your adult credentials.”

Pam shrugged and went back to her reading. “Whatever.”

J dashed back in at this point to say the hyena people’s things were on their way, as well as their ride; a cabbie J knew personally, and trusted not to gossip if he said it mattered.

“We can’t pay…” said Summer; the clown waved this concern away.

“It’s all good. There’s somewhere else it turns out I gotta be, though, so…”

“We can hold down Fort Bus Station,” Harley assured her husband, feeling her mouth quirk fondly.

She and Jon weren’t scheduled to reopen the clinic this evening until eight. Waylon had Ella for now, and they'd dedicated half this morning to family time for just the three of them, before Harley had taken Ella out to buy new shoes. They scheduled themselves more 'days off' than looked entirely reasonable written down, precisely because something usually came up. J couldn't restrict all his running around helping people to when she was busy in the clinic, and it wasn't as if she was immune to having things like this crop up either.

“Thanks, oh queen of my heart.” He leaned in to press a kiss against her hairline. “Jon, you’ll prob’ly want to have input on this one, it involves Gotham U…”

Jon got up to follow him and her clown prince was off again with a wave.

Silence settled, but only briefly. Harley turned to the Hyenas.

“While we’re waiting," she said delicately. "...I was thinking maybe we could discuss how you’ve been managing your condition. Call it a consultation?”

Neither of them had any objection. The three of them withdrew to what had been the station office and sat crosslegged in a triangle on dusty carpet to consult.

Harlequin didn’t rush to make suggestions; the two of them had had this condition for nearly three years, now, and would probably have tried anything she was likely to think up off the top of her head.

Mood stabilizers apparently were good for temporary boosts in control but evidently couldn’t be relied on to solve the problem—whether they actually _caused_ rarer but more violent episodes or whether they had simply encouraged Summer to neglect other forms of emotional management, which had resulted in buildup of deferred negativity, couldn’t be ascertained from the available information. Both Summer and Jivan were understandably reluctant to repeat the experiment enough times to gather scientifically significant data, even if they’d had anyone to prescribe them a drug regimen at present. (Jon could do it, somewhat illegally, but then there was cost to consider.)

Summer had brought up meditation as a core part of their management system; Jivan now explained that he’d studied under experienced instructors at home in Bhavnagar. But it evidently hadn’t been serving him as well as he wished it would, and beyond the basic utility of techniques like deep breathing for biofeedback to encourage calm, it wasn’t working for Summer much at all.

“I sought out instruction with the idea it would help me maintain religious practice while alone in a foreign country,” said Jivan composedly. It was odd to think he had the reservoir of rage that both hyenas assured him was vital for the infection to take root. But that, Harley knew, was often the _point_ of such reserve. “Meditation is first of all a tool to know and control the mind, and this is just the sort of thing it’s good for. But I’m not really qualified to be a teacher.”

“It’s not your fault,” Summer said sharply. “We both know _you_ aren’t the problem here.”

“Summer, that’s—” Jivan’s face was soft as he said her name, and leaned forward a little, as if about to reach out.

She sat back abruptly, out of reach. “I—sorry,” she said, a little choppily. “I get…I know this is all my fault, and as long as I can’t let go of the guilt over that I keep getting so _angry_ at myself, and I know that’s counterproductive but it’s still…”

“Don’t try to push when you’ve hit a limit,” Harley soothed. “That won’t help anybody, you know that.”

Summer nodded, but it was an absent, distraught thing, and she might or might not have actually heard. “Yeah, I just…”

With that unfinished sentence, she picked herself up and fled, her somewhat battered boots thock-thocking against the long-neglected floor.

“I’ll go after her,” Harley promised Jivan’s horribly conflicted expression. “I obviously can’t _blame_ you for being personally involved in the case, but we both know that complicates any attempt to provide treatment.”

Jivan winced, a little, and nodded, his eyes turned aside. “I make her guilty,” he said quietly. “I can’t seem to help it.”

“It’s nothing you’re doing,” Harley assured him. “They’re her feelings, you won’t help either of you by taking responsibility for them.”

He nodded. “Aren’t you going after her?”

“Once she’s had a little while to collect herself.” People needed space, sometimes just as much as they needed support.

They talked a little more, but less intensely, before Harley transferred Jivan to the absent supervision of Enigma and Ivy out in the lobby, and went to find Summer.

It turned out the shapeshifter had withdrawn into the old ladies’ room, which had been more heavily vandalized than most of the station. The sheet of mirror had at some point been smashed without falling apart, so cracks crazed out from a single point of impact, yielding a broken image. Harley found Summer standing at the sinks, staring into the mirror near the center of the web, where the fragments were almost too small to reflect anything but light.

“I used to know who I was,” she said, without turning. “I got anxious, sometimes, and I had a temper, and my first career hadn’t panned out, but I—I knew who I was. I was the tough one. I was _in control_.”

Harley came up beside her, stopped a respectful distance away and propped her hip against the bank of sinks. To her right, the mirror reflected her back as several disparate shards of woman—red-painted lips quirked, the hinge of her jaw, a tumble of yellow hair. “It’s okay not to always be.”

“Not for me.” Summer’s hand closed sharply on chipped formica, and then relaxed itself forcibly, as much of a misnomer as that should have been. “Never for me. Especially not now.” She lifted her eyes up to the mirror again and let her lip curl back just a little at the fragmented being staring back at her. Over her shoulder, a red spray-painted scrawl across the fronts of the abandoned stalls was reflected back as shards of text, legible only as _FU—AL—3ITC—_

“You told me repressing things just makes them worse for your calm in the long-term,” Harlequin said, with the full weight of her professional opinion backing up that self-assessment through tone alone.

“Yeah, well. Losing control in the short-term is the worst, I’ll let it go when it’s safe.” She glowered half-heartedly down into the bone-dry dust-clogged drain. “Who am I kidding. It’s never really safe. I’m always going to hurt someone no matter what I do. Your friend Janus—”

“Is going to be fine. He’ll be _fine_ , Summer. And if by incredibly bad luck he’s not, you’ll help him. We’ll help him. Everyone will be there for each other. And it’ll all work out.”

“That isn’t how the world really works,” Summer pointed out, without much energy.

“On the contrary, I’ve found that if you can get together enough people who think it probably is, then it does.”

Summer Day looked up and searched Harley's face at this, for certainty, or honesty, or overt signs of delusion. For something. At last, her tight shoulders dropped a little, and the corners of her mouth twitched a very little.

“In Jivan’s defense,” she said changing the subject abruptly in a tone that sounded somehow like surrender, and turning her back abruptly on her shattered reflection, “he wasn’t technically my _doctor_. He’s still working on his US licensure; the clinic hired him at a pittance because he’s an expert but his degree isn’t automatically accepted here.”

“He had to put his certification on hold to deal with the hyena problem, didn’t he,” Harley said, and when Summer looked away, misery resurfacing, she stepped up, reached out and touched her shoulder. “Summer, no. He doesn’t blame you.”

“That just makes it worse,” she mumbled. “I made his life harder and he just blames himself, for getting involved with me. He stopped calling his mom because she’s so disappointed in him. He can’t even rely on his _religion_ as much as he should to help him get through it because I’m messing that up, too.”

“Hey. Shh. He doesn’t just not blame you, he doesn’t regret it. You’ve seen how he looks at you.” Summer’s lips drew back from her teeth, not a sneer now but a snarl, like she was trying to threaten her own emotions into submission.

Harley kept patting her shoulder, fingers just barely lifting before they came back down _—_ a soothing rhythm without the level of potentially intrusive intimacy that rubbing back and forth could be. “I _know_ , okay? Where he's coming from.

"It was a little different for me,” she allowed, “but it was enough the same. I _lost_ my license helping J escape, because he didn’t belong in the asylum, because we were being used to punish him rather than giving him any help at all. It was worth it. It would be worth it even if I hadn’t gotten the chance to build a new family because of it.”

“That’s not…he didn’t _consent_ to this! I _infected_ him.”

That was an important difference, but it also wasn’t, because Doctor Shi _had_ chosen to care and chosen to stay with her, and didn’t assign responsibility to her for something she hadn’t done on purpose.

The two of them loved each other, and maybe they were also in love, but if there was one thing Harley had learned in psychiatry and again in community activism it was that pain _could_ conquer love, if you let it. Could poison it or burn it out of you, or just make of it a burden to be carried. You couldn’t just point love at a problem and expect it to become solved.

“…you know guilt isn’t a productive emotion here.”

“I _know!_ I’m making it worse by feeling bad so then I feel bad about that _too_ , which is making it worse, which…” Summer trailed off. “It’s stupid. I _know_ it’s stupid. This is why the meditation doesn’t work, I always get stuck on this—spiral, thing. I think about the life he left behind to chase his dreams, and the dreams he left behind because of—me. I can’t…”

Her fingernails were dragging themselves along the surface of the sink, and though they had not changed and were still human fingernails the sound of the scratching was deepening, slowing, as the edges toughened and the claws she didn’t have began to bite into the surface of the ancient formica. There was a faint scent of formaldehyde.

Harley put her hand softly on the back of Summer Day’s. The tight wires of her tendons shivered. “Shh,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“It’s _not._ ”

“There are a lot of real problems and it’s fine to be upset about them. You _should_ be upset, when things are wrong. That’s okay. Don’t blame yourself for that.”

Harley pressed down, palm giving against knuckles, and then drew her hand back.

“You feel bad for all those reasons you just told me about. And Jivan feels bad that he made your situation worse by getting attached to you when he was supposed to be helping. He doesn’t think you did anything to him; he thinks he let both of you down.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“It’s ridiculous for him to blame himself for getting sick, but not for you?”

Summer’s mouth opened, froze, drew together, relaxed into uncertainty.

Harley leaned the upper flange of her hipbone comfortably against the edge of the long-abandoned bank of sinks. “You were right that you needed some distance. And you’re right that completely self-isolating isn’t a solution. Not just because your eventual goal is to be able to live normally in society again, but because people need other people. Hyenas live in clans, right? Well, the natural organization of the human is the family and the tribe. Handling your problems alone is necessary sometimes, but it’s not something you have a _duty_ to do if there are other options.

“The two of you have each other. And that’s wonderful. But if you put all your effort into supporting each other and feeling guilty for being helped, you can’t take care of yourselves, or be effectively taken care of. Here’s what I think. The thing that will help most is for you both to have someone to lean on who’s outside the problem. It doesn’t have to be me. I’m not even sure how much help I can be long-distance. But somebody.

“I’m not saying you can’t lick this on your own, but having outside support will definitely help you get there faster.”

Summer nodded. She hadn’t cried, but her eyes hung nearly closed and her eyelashes were damp. “Your…Janus said that too,” she murmured. “That it was good we have each other. The two of us.”

“It is good,” Harley agreed. Made a note to congratulate Harvey on his sensitivity later, he would be so _embarrassed._ “For both of you, if you let it be. But you haven’t done anything to keep yourselves from deserving more help on top of that. Okay?”

Summer nodded again. “Yeah, I…”

“It’s not weakness, to borrow someone else’s strength.”

Summer raised her eyes at this one, finally, and smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Here’s my number, okay?” Harlequin said, passing over a neatly lettered business card. “If you need anything, or somebody to talk to, or recommendations about who to talk to. It’s subject to change because we have to move a lot, though cellular phones are getting cheaper so maybe we’ll be able to hold onto a number for a while pretty soon. Until then, _this_ is the number you call to get the new number for me, if the old one stops working. It’s a Chinese restaurant, just ask to talk to chef Bao. You may have to hold a little or call back, especially if you call during the dinner rush.

“Down here’s my email, it’s pretty stable and secure with Enigma’s encryptions, so I recommend that if it’s not an emergency.”

Summer Day let all her breath out in a huff and slid the card into the pocket of her gifted sweat pants. “I…thank you. I…need to talk to Jivan before anything else, I think.”

“That would probably be good.” Harlequin waited a few seconds, then said, “You seem like you could really do with a hug right now. Hug?”

Summer was stronger even in her human form than should really be possible, but the hug didn't actually hurt, and as they broke apart Harley said, "so, you know that sleeping gas we used at the police station? Do you think really strong sleeping-gas bombs would sometimes be good to have?"

"To take ourselves out before we can lose control?"

Harley shrugged. "You. Anybody giving you a problem. Everyone in a forty-foot radius. Watch the extra-strong ones indoors though."

"That...actually sounds...yeah." A different sort of relaxation was breaking over Summer than the one that had come from managing an emotional release without going furry and fanged. The relief of having one more tool in her arsenal.

It wasn't a solution. But sometimes it wasn't your job to solve a problem. Just patch it together until the people it belonged to could work it out.

"If Jivan agrees, send us your address after you get home, we'll mail you a stash." Harley didn't have to think twice about this promise. Jon would undoubtedly send them along with an incredibly detailed instruction booklet about all the ways use of his knock-out gas could go wrong and how not to screw it up, but he wouldn't say no.

* * *

They came back out in step with one another despite the height difference, to find everyone decamped to out in front of the building, where the taxi had arrived.

Ivy was _still_ reading her book but had come out to see the hyenas off, Enigma closed out of a holographic screen where he’d been writing up some sort of program when he saw them coming. Jokester had reappeared already on the curb beside the open driver’s window of the cab, where he was leaning in and describing an incident involving custard with many large hand gestures, he'd brought Strawman with him, and Red Hood had come out of hiding to lean against the cockeyed pole of an elderly stop sign, though Summer almost didn’t recognize him because he’d traded out the full-face helmet for a domino mask like Harlequin’s. (He really was just a kid.)

Once the bags had been checked over and affirmed the right ones and Avi, the taxi driver, had popped the trunk so they could be loaded in, Summer turned to Harlequin and said, “Thank you. I—both of you, all of you, we already said this, but…I want to thank you personally, for….”

Harlequin shook her head, smiling. “It was nothing. Really. I’m just glad you let us help. A lot of people won't, you know.”

Summer and Jivan made remarkably different rueful faces, which made both Harlequin and Jokester laugh, and then the blonde clown stepped in, gave Summer a final swift, fierce hug around the ribs, stepped back, and only then asked brightly,

“Friends, then?”

Summer hesitated, off-balance. Pointed out, “People are usually a little more put-off by the periodic transformations into giant predators.”

“ _Summer_. My husband is a Technicolor clown with an Interpol file.”

Hyena Woman laughed. It was an entirely human sound. “Okay. You win.”

“She does that,” said the Wild Rose. Jokester closed the trunk of the car with what managed to be a cheerful bang.

“Okay,” cut in the Red Hood, “not to be unfriendly, but nice to meet you and now get on the hell out of town, before Janus gets what you’ve got.”

“Aww, I didn’t know you cared,” said Enigma, sardonic on Janus' absent behalf.

Hood shrugged. “I don’t; my status as most unstable member of this team is being threatened. I’m defending my territory.”

“Twice over,” Jivan observed, taking the Red Hood’s raillery as literally as it was none-too-secretly intended, and inclined his head. “I would hate to overstay our welcome.”

He got into the car first, sliding across to the far side of the back seat with only a little visible discomfort at occupying the unfamiliar space in sweatpants and flip-flops. Summer swung herself in after him, and reached across the narrow middle seat between them to close her hand over the back of his just for a second, before applying herself to the business of buckling in and shutting the car door.

“Don’t forget to write!” Harlequin called just as it closed.

Avi the taxi driver glanced an entire paragraph of feeling at Jokester, who laughed uproariously in response. Pam flipped both men off in a desultory defense of her sex. Summer waved out the window, as the cab pulled away and turned south. They’d be outside city limits in half an hour, barring traffic incident.

“So,” said the Red Hood, as the taxi disappeared onto the next block, “are we going to ‘fess up to Mothman that after all that, we helped the werehyenas escape custody?”

“Not it,” declared Harley. She, Jokester, and a second later Jason all touched their noses. Jon's hand moved for a second before he clearly overruled the impulse to imitate the group in favor of not being completely ridiculous. Ed was ignoring them all. Ivy flipped her journal shut and rolled her eyes.

“Nobody died,” she informed Jason. “That means we win.”

A grin flashed across the young man’s face, half Talon’s ferocity, half Jokester’s delight. “Those are the rules, huh?”

“Yup.” Ivy wrapped her hand absently around the too-narrow trunk of a decorative cherry tree planted here when the neighborhood was still being built up, instead of being allowed to decline, and which was reaching the utter limits of the space it had been given. Reached deep into it to help it break its roots through into the soil buried beneath concrete. “Those are the rules.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaand that's a wrap. <3


End file.
